


Wonder

by loadedcasserole



Category: The Transformers (IDW Generation One), Transformers - All Media Types
Genre: Canon-Compliant, Gen, I picked the best day to post, Not Beta Read
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-02-02
Updated: 2020-02-02
Packaged: 2021-02-28 01:36:04
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,675
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22525669
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/loadedcasserole/pseuds/loadedcasserole
Summary: Before the launch of the Ark, the first ever of its kind, Rung took a walk into a field and got much more than he expected.
Comments: 3
Kudos: 37





	Wonder

**Author's Note:**

> Ever since I read a certain [tweet](https://twitter.com/jroberts332/status/1052268654493032448) by Roberts, I've desperately wanted to see it realized, but I just decided to reverse engineer something to tie me over. Hopefully it's to taste.

Rung waved at the guards as he moved on, the wheels on his luggage bouncing haphazardly off the surrounding rock. The bots had been an amiable bunch, once he showed them his clearance. He thanked his lucky stars that the security around the Ark wasn’t so tight as to disallow his informal travel.  
  


He set his sights on the ship. It was a behemoth. Once he escaped the city line, that became quite clear. Rung had started his walk at dawn, and while it was very prominent, it didn’t seem any closer. That was fine. He had missed the shuttle there, but he would arrive with plenty of time to spare. And more, this allowed him to examine the details of the Ark. He wanted to see it in its pristine condition before the natural damage of space made its mark. Rung viewed it as a nice happenstance.  
  


He cleared a hill and marveled at the sight. The information videos and data-packets he had received were of the cursory sort, meant for those who had very little to do with the ship itself. They always showed it with the same boring angles. From what he could tell, the ship had some new modifications.  
  


Rung tapped at his glasses until it magnified his view. Windows had disappeared in some areas and asserted themselves in others. The curvature of the sides looked less exaggerated and the thrusters were strangely smaller. Curious. If all this had changed on the outside, surely the inside would be much more strange. He trotted along with a little more pep. Oh, he _had_ to get the blueprints.  
  


A flash of light suddenly encompassed his vision.   
  


Rung stumbled and froze, quickly zooming out so as to not get further disoriented. It took but a moment for his sight to clear and the problem found.  
  


"Oh . . . oh goodness."  
  


The empty plain he had been traversing had become a landscape of light. The ground was covered in bubbles—no, sparks. As far as he could see, they covered the land. Their combined luminescence so bright that it cast the Ark and nearby buildings in an otherworldly light.  
  


Rung had walked right into an active hotspot.  
  


He stood at the edge in awe. He couldn't believe it.  
  


Outside of being present for your own birth, it was nearly impossible to visit a lit hotspot. Much less the moment it appeared. Those that ushered in the next generation were highly trained for the task or observed by the highest classes.  
  


Rung didn’t put much stock in luck, but he thought that today might be the culmination of all of his.  
  


He crouched with reverence. Within the cycle, the area would be swarming with blacksmiths, transports, and guards keeping out wayward spectators. He would go when they arrived, probably forced in the very direction which he came, but for now, he would enjoy the experience.  
  


The spark before him glowed warmly. Something about it sent a feeling of longing through him. Rung wanted to cup it, hold it to himself, ease its transition somehow, but he kept his hands firmly on his knees. It didn't need help and he wasn't a blacksmith anyhow.  
  


Who would this person be, he wondered.  
  


A nearby flicker caught his eye. Rung looked up to see another spark with its light dimming and brightening. Rung, without any real thought, rose and knelt beside it.  
  


He didn't know much about hot spots and newsparks, but Rung had enough basic medical training to recognize that something wasn’t quite right. He didn’t have the experience to back his ideas, but if he had to guess, he would say the spark was distressed.  
  


It shrunk in size.  
  


"Ah!" he gasped and reached for it. A soft clink sounded. He pulled his hands back just as suddenly, remembering himself. He couldn’t do anything, but something was wrong. It was . . . struggling? Yes. Probably.   
  


It flickered and shrunk further. It was going out.   
  


At this rate, it would be gone by the time real help arrived.  
  


He looked up for some kind of inspiration, and was further alarmed to find that more sparks were flickering. Rung knew a bit about statistics, and this was normal, wasn’t it? He shouldn't make a fuss. Not every spark made it into being. That was life for you. It did its best, but it wasn’t a perfect process.   
  


It still set him on edge. Surely he could do something? Anything? It had to be better than tapping his knees and doing nothing at all, right? He searched his head and referenced a medical database at a lightning pace. He came up empty-handed. There were only texts documenting the occurrence, but no real solutions.  
  


A nearby light went out, leaving a pit where it had once been embedded.  
  


His spark shuddered. The air shimmered around him. Light and debris fell from the sky and bounced off of him, and the ground, in a wave of pattering noise. Rung ducked and covered his head.  
  


Hail? Here? Now?  
  


It ended as abruptly as it came.   
  


It wasn’t hail, he realized, as he stared at the glittering shards at his pedes. At least, not the kind he was familiar with. It was a kind of crystal. Rung thought he had seen something like it before, but he wasn't sure where. He glanced above to find the sky clear. He didn’t know what kind of freak weather pattern he was dealing with, but he noticed yet another problem. For fifty meters, in every direction, the sparks had disappeared. Not only the struggling ones, but all of them.  
  


"Oh no."  
  


The only evidence of their existence was the presence of craters that their ignition had created.  
  


In their place, at the bottom of each pit, were piles of crystal that shined brightly. The ones at his pedes, and the crystal laying between the craters, were dull in comparison.   
  


Somehow, the crystals had dispersed the fragile energies of the sparks and were glowing in reaction. He mournfully poked at the clump of shining crystal before him. He blinked away the fluid gathering in his optics.  
  


So much waste. Who would do this?  
  


The crystals under his hand bonded together easily, like magnets, with barely any prompting. Before Rung knew it, he had formed a ball. It accumulated all of its sister materials and stopped once the nearby light shards had been gobbled up. If the surface was only a bit less opaque, Rung could have mistaken it for a regular spark.  
  


A glance up revealed that the nearby piles had collected themselves into their own orbs. The one on his right shifted minutely and the surface dissipated like ice on a hot day, revealing a completely whole spark underneath. The spark settled into its original nesting spot, as though it hadn’t been disturbed at all. The sparks around him followed suit and the area was back to how it began. Almost.  
  


The orb he had been poking at didn’t mimic them. Neither did the formerly flickering sparks. Instead the orbs idled and glowed steadily. At the very least, they looked stable now. This was a good thing, he decided. Strange. But good. Perhaps the crystal worked like a sponge. Rung wondered why he hadn’t heard of this sort of thing before.  
  


He gently pushed at his orb for further study. Clearly it wasn’t troubled by his senseless pawing before, and he didn’t think it would bother it now.  
  


“What’s wrong?” Rung asked it quietly. It had no answers for him. Luckily, the movement revealed a clue. There was something missing. He used his other hand to lightly dig at the soil below it. There should be living metal at this point. That’s why the spark, and most likely the others, had trouble. It had nothing to anchor itself to. Well, there was something that could be done about that. He stood and cradled the ball near his own spark. It glowed more brilliantly than before.  
  


He just had to find a bloom without a spark. Somehow.  
  


He walked around aimlessly. There was a time limit on finding the metal before it dispersed, but according to his reference, that wouldn't be for days. Rung didn't know how the precious metal was typically found, but he thought that an empty patch of ground looked unusual and started there. He dug at the ground with fervor.  
  


With barely any progress to show, Rung was halted by a nearby cry. "Hey! Stop! What are you doing?"  
  


He jerked up and saw a guard stomping his way. It wasn't one he recognized from before. "I- Sorry, I- nothing, I just saw these sparks and these crystals appeared and I thought-" Ice ran through his lines as he considered how odd he must seem. He backpedaled. "I'm sorry, I'm Rung. I'll be traveling on the Ark."  
  


He switched the orb to his other hand so that he could offer his arm to be searched for his clearance codes. "I have the necessary files."  
  


The guard approached cautiously, but didn't take him up on the offer. A finger pointed to the captured spark. "What's that?"  
  


" . . . I'm not entirely sure, but-"  
  


"Put it down."  
  


"It's not dangerous." Probably. He belatedly realized that he couldn’t prove that it was entirely harmless. It was only his opinion. And he could be terribly wrong. For all he knew, the crystals _could_ be dangerous. Nothing about this was normal. "Well, actually, I just think-"  
  


"Put it down!" The guard placed a hand on his gun and waved at Rung with the other.  
  


Rung aborted his full body bristle before he was misunderstood for being aggressive and softly set it down. He prayed that it didn't decide to suddenly undo itself like the ones before. It just needed to hold for a while longer. He turned when prompted and was cuffed with rough hands that didn't quite understand what the tolerance of Rung's frame allowed. He tried his defuse the situation. "I'm on the roster for the Ark. You can check my-"  
  


"What are you doing to these sparks? What is this stuff?" The guard punctuated with a stomp of crystal. Rung whipped his head around at the sound to make sure it wasn't the orb. Thankfully, it was whole.  
  


The guard shook him, taking his movement for belligerence and repeated the question. "I don't know!" Rung shouted. "I think it soaks up sparks? It helps stabilize the ones that need it, at least. It came from the sky."  
  


"This is a restricted airspace. Nothing goes over here."  
  


Huh. An aircraft would make much more sense than his weather assumption, but if it wasn’t that, he was stumped. The shards definitely came from the air.  
  


Two more guards appeared at the crest of the hill. They skidded down without preamble. One yelled cheerfully their way while the other poked at the debris with a pede. "Hey! It's that guy-uh, Eyebrows!" Rung's spark swelled with hope. He had never been so glad to hear that awful name in his life. "What'd you get arrested for?"  
  


Rung slouched and didn't answer. He had a feeling that he might get charged and anything he might say to that could be detrimental to him. He should have done better and not said anything in the first place, but he had been too worried.  
  


“You let him through? That’s the exact opposite of what you’re hired to do.”  
  


“Yeah, but he’s got codes, and that’s fine.”  
  


He was pushed toward the new guards and he took the opportunity to check in on the nearby orbs. They were holding. Should he really keep quiet right now, on something like this? Forget the wise choice, if something bad happened because he was too concerned about himself, it would be unbearable.  
  


“No, it’s not fine. It’s sloppy and lazy and- you know what, never mind. We don’t have time. We have less than a cycle before this place becomes a madhouse. Just take him in for holding. He was messing around with the sparks and someone is going to have questions for him.”  
  


The mechs groaned and guided him away with minimal fuss. Their disappointment was thick in the air. Rung didn’t think that they would be half as amiable with him as they were before. He tried anyway. “I apologize for the trouble. I admit, curiosity got the better of me.”  
  


“Hm.”  
  


“I saw sparks extinguishing and I thought that I might be able to help some.”  
  


The one guard bobbed his head. “Ah, I can understand that. If that’s the case, don’t worry. You see that tower over there?” The mech pointed to a tall structure in the distance. Rung nodded. “The cameras on that thing will have no problem picking you up. You’ll be out, eh, probably by the end of the day.”  
  


That would be wonderful! Maybe they would help uncover the odd phenomenon too. In the meantime . . . “I don’t know how useful, or helpful, or good this really is, or if there’s any side-effects from it, but those crystals there seem to help you move sparks that don’t have any living metal nearby. Could you . . . pass it on? The ones in orbs were fading out before they were encased and it might save them.”

oOo

Nova had not been on the Ark when Rivet's Field had lit, his days too busy leading up to the launch to stay stationary.   
  


And so it was dawn, the next day, when Nova received the best news of his life. Not the fact that the field had lit, that was marvelous enough, but what the ignition had uncovered.  
  


Nova watched the security footage provided to him with rapt interest as his staff piled him with information. He distractedly turned a ball in his servos. Its light brightened and waned with each movement.  
  


"-and it worked! The General is interrogating him but he doesn't know or he won't crack. He's really not happy about being there, so he could just be trying to be difficult. But-"  
  


"Can he do that again?" Nova paused and pointed to the screen. The counselor leaned to have a look, keeping his pedes glued to the spot. Nova could have moved the display for easier viewing, but didn't.  
  


The screen was paused to show the very moment when the bot stepped onto the field and it had ignited. There was obviously some correlation. If it was just chance, it might have lit while the bot was halfway across it. Instead the mech stood at the very edge, as though one pede had pressed a power button.  
  


"We don't know," the mech hastily said. "He's been able to make more crystals, at least. Ever since they showed him the footage. But he couldn't recreate the event. All they tried was shoving him outside though, which isn't exactly the smartest course of action, but what can you expect with-"  
  


"I imagine not. There's a reason why sparks don't show in cities. There are regulations against building in a potential ignition zone. A better geographic location is in order. Perhaps places that have had multiple hotspots." Which might prove fruitless anyway. Unlikely as it appeared, it _could_ still be a fluke. Perhaps it was just Primus’s way of calling the bot to attention. If it were, it had certainly worked.  
  


He could settle for the simple fact that the bot could easily produce receptacles for sparks. That was a boon without precedence. The missing link to a problem that had vexed him for vorns.  
  


"Schedule an extra stop before launch. I'd like to meet this bot before I leave."  
  


He had to. The ignition was a clear enough sign of divine approval for Nova's impending crusade. And the bot, a gift and tool, sent for the sole purpose of expanding Nova's empire.   
  


Primus was pleased with him and Nova would not spurn his affections by leaving such a gracious gift unacknowledged.  
  


He stood and pocketed the orb. "And call Chief Tyrest. Tell him that I have what he's looking for."

**Author's Note:**

> I haven't read any of the new IDW stuff yet, but hopefully nothing in it has contradicted this.
> 
> And hey, for the sake of horribleness, what if I said that Nova didn't push back the launch date to make sure that all the sparks were safely harvested/developed? Maybe he just blasted off and thought, "Well, if Primus was that concerned about it, this would have shown up earlier."


End file.
